RFC: Making focus information visible for panes

[Matthew Woehlke]

Celeste Lyn Paul wrote:
> On Monday 27 November 2006 19:11, Matthew Woehlke wrote:
>> Jaroslaw Staniek wrote:
>>> The problem is that users can never get a hint where the focus is (main
>>> pane or the side pane). My proposal is to require (from app authors and
>>> from KDE Style creators) to show the focus by highlighting the current
>>> tab (with KDE Highlight color, currently blue) if it's focused, and
>>> highlight the KMainWindow's dock's header in the same way.
>> Isn't this something handled by the qt-style (QStyle/KStyle) being used?
>> [snip]For example, Plastik draws a highlight-colored box around textboxes, etc
>> that have keyboard focus. I don't know of any reason why a qt-style
>> can't do the same thing for tabs or other widgets. You can certainly
>> make this policy (although I would strongly recommend you allow it to be
>> a configuration option in the style) but it is still up to qt-style
>> writers to implement it.
>>
>> IMO this is something you should never, ever write hacks to address.
>> Overriding the user's choice of qt-style should only be done out of
>> extreme necessity.
> 
> It _should_ be mandatory, added in to the kdelibs, and not handled by the 
> style at all

It can be a mandatory *policy* (but I'm likely to file a bug report if I 
can't turn it off; that would be uncalled-for), but how would you go 
about implementing it in kdelibs? If you did that, it would be hack-ish, 
it would override functionality that styles are *supposed* to address, 
and wouldn't work for Qt-but-not-KDE applications.

...unless you meant it should be in KStyle which IIRC is in kdelibs and 
is the base class for *some* Qt styles (which would still allow styles 
to override the behavior, which is IMO a Good Thing).

-- 
Matthew
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